‘Shit!’ he hissed from between clenched teeth.
He set the broken radio aside and lowered his head, one arm and shoulder into the wormhole. He gripped its rim with his free hand and hooked one foot round a knob of rock. And he stretched himself down and around, inching his fingers toward Simmons’s radio. Its antenna was fully extended, formed a slender, flexible half-hoop of telescoping metal sections where it had somehow jammed against the sides of the shaft to halt the radio’s descent. Vyotsky’s straining fingers touched the antenna – dislodged it!
Damn!
The set went clattering out of sight into unknown depths below.
Vyotsky snatched himself viciously up and out of the hole and jumped to his feet. Of all the bloody luck! He picked up his own set again, said: ‘Zek, I can’t hear you. I know you’re out there and you can probably hear me, but I can’t hear you. If you get my message you’ll most likely want to start looking for me. Right now I’m at the sphere but I won’t be staying here. Anyway, I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for you, Zek. It looks like I’m your one hope. How’s that for a novel situation?’
The red light on his set started flickering again, a brief, unintelligible morse message that wasn’t intended to be understood. He couldn’t tell if she was pleading with him or screaming her defiance. But sooner or later she would have to search him out. He’d been lying when he said he was her one chance, but of course she couldn’t know that. She might suspect it, but still she couldn’t afford to ignore him.
Vyotsky grinned, however nervously. At least there was one thing in this damned world he could appreciate. And would appreciate. Still grinning, he switched his radio off … ,
10
Zek
Two hours after setting out from the sphere – two lonely, shadowy hours, with only the grunts and groans of his own exertions for company – Jazz Simmons paused for his first real break and found a seat on a tall, flat-topped boulder which gave him good vantage over the terrain all around. He took hard biscuits from his pack and two cubes of dense black chocolate designed for sucking, not biting. Wash these down with a sip of water, and then he’d be on his way again. But now, while he sat here easing his deceptively gangly but powerful frame and catching a breather, there was time to look around a little and consider his position.
‘His position’. That was a laugh! It certainly wasn’t an enviable position: alone in a strange land, with hardtack food sufficient to last a week, enough weaponry to start World War III, and so far nothing to shoot at, blast or burn! Not that he was complaining about that. But again the thought occurred: where were they? Where in hell were this world’s denizens? And when he did eventually find them, or they found him, what would they be like? Which was to assume, of course, that there were others here unlike those he already knew about. Which was to hope so, anyway.
It was as if his private thoughts were an invocation. Two things occurred simultaneously: first a rim of bright half-moon, rising in the west and turning the sky in that quarter a gold-tinged indigo, showed itself over the peaks on the opposite side of the gorge; and second . . . second there sounded a far, almost anguished howl, a reverberating, sustained note echoing up to the moon and down again, picked up by kindred throats and passed mournfully on up the pass into the beckoning distance.
There could be no mistaking cries like that – wolves! And Jazz remembered what he’d been told about Encounter Two. That one had been lame, blind, harmless. These weren’t. Nothing that sounded like that could possibly be in anything other than extremely good health. Which didn’t bode too well for his own!
Jazz finished eating, washed the gritty chocolate from the back of his throat, adjusted his pack and got down from his rock. Time he was on his way again. But – he paused, then froze in his tracks, stared directly ahead, and up, and up!